The widely hated James Bond moment that the director regrets: “The only thing I’d do differently”
Throughout 25 blockbusting spy thrillers, James Bond has given fans countless incredible moments that play over and over in their heads. From Sean Connery’s iconic introduction in Dr No to the ski jump in The Spy Who Loved Me to the tank sequence in GoldenEye, Bond has often mastered the art of looking incredibly cool while doing amazing things. However, as with any series that has lasted as long as Bond, several scenes are scattered throughout the series that didn’t fly quite as high. In fact, one of the franchise’s most hated moments was an instant regret of the director behind it – although he maintains to this day that the sequence couldn’t have been achieved in any other way.
In the early 2000s, a hot young director caught the eye of Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson. Until then, most of the franchise’s directors had been British, but they had a good experience with Martin Campbell, who hailed from New Zealand, on 1995’s GoldenEye. Therefore, when Lee Tamahori made waves with Once Were Warriors in 1994 and followed it up by proving he could handle Hollywood potboilers with The Edge, and Along Came a Spider, he suddenly found himself in the frame for Bond.
“My agent called me up one day and said, ‘Would you like to direct a James Bond film?'” Tamahori told Yahoo Entertainment in 2022. “And it took me about two seconds to say ‘yes’. I’m a great fan.”
Interestingly, Tamahori revealed that he is a particular kind of Bond fan, though. He’s never been hugely fond of the more gritty and realistic tone used in the Timothy Dalton films and the Daniel Craig ones that came after his 2002 effort. Instead, he explained, “I was very much in favour…of the James Bond era when there were lasers in space destroying the earth. Just over the top, larger than life, where everything is in peril from a space laser, and Bond has got to stop it.”
With this in mind, the sequence Tamahori admits he regrets from Die Another Day begins to make much more sense. In the film’s climax, the Icarus orbiting satellite causes a vast tidal wave that Bond is forced to surf using only a kite and kayak to keep himself upright. It’s an objectively silly, preposterous, and over-the-top sequence that would have been perfectly at home in the Roger Moore era of films like You Only Live Twice and Moonraker.
Unfortunately for Tamahori, though, the only way to achieve the scene was to use CGI extensively, which had been mostly avoided in the Bond movies of that period. In truth, he may have gotten away with it if the computer-generated stunt had looked in any way passable, but the scene was so laughably rendered that it became the single image that stuck from the film. It was a case of technology being incapable of realising a director’s vision for a bravura sequence – and Tamahori took the lion’s share of the flak for it.
“The only thing I’d do differently would be the kitesurfing sequence,” Tamahori admitted. “I don’t know how you’d do it differently. It was virtually impossible to do it for real as a real stunt: falling off the edge of a glacier, hastily concocting a kite-surfing rig, and kitesurfing your way out of danger. If you tried to do it for real? You just couldn’t do it.”
Tamahori confessed that he always knew the sequence would be controversial for Bond fans who prided themselves on the series favouring tangible, death-defying stunt work over visual effects. Still, he forged ahead with it, and the production committed hundreds of thousands of dollars into research and development. The biggest problem was that animating CGI water to any realistic level was incredibly difficult in that period, leaving little time or money to composite Pierce Brosnan’s Bond into the image accurately.
“You can buy off-the-shelf software to do water CGI now, but we spent a fortune on R&D,” Tamahori lamented. “It never really got up to the level that you can do today. But we were committed to it.” Ultimately, Tamahori tried to ride the wave of technology and wound up wiping out – but that happens sometimes. In the end, he was just a guy getting to live his dream of making a Bond movie, and he overreached.
“There are a lot of things in there that people just see as being larger than life and maybe a little over the top,” he smiled. “But I was having such a good time, and it was a great thing to live through. I couldn’t stop myself.”
